The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Telecommunications solutions often require management of telephones and voice mailboxes distributed across a network. To process voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls, call processing systems often require the network address of the telephones and call processing systems associated with the calls. Often, telephones and call processing systems must be configured manually to connect to telephones and voice mailboxes. Even if locally attached telephones can be automatically configured, many call processing systems require manual configuration to access telephones and call processing systems connected across a wide area network (WAN) or through one or more internetworks. Manual configuration may also be required when the topology of a telecommunications system changes or when the network addresses of telephonic device and services are reassigned.
Additionally, even when the network address of a telephone extension is known, call processing systems often cannot determine if a voice mailbox is associated with the telephone extension. If a voice mailbox is associated with a known telephone extension, many call processing systems cannot identify the network address necessary to access the voice mailbox directly. As a result, many telecommunications systems cannot directly access the voice mailbox associated with a telephone extension. Instead, many systems must ring a telephone extension and rely on another system managing the telephone extension to transfer the call to an associated voice mailbox.
Service discovery approaches are often limited small network segments. Local broadcast mechanisms, such as Ethernet layer 2 for example, reach only systems in a single LAN segment. Among many systems, multicast over Ethernet layer 3 generates a large volume of network traffic and thus is inappropriate for service discovery. Other broadcast and multicast approaches generate a prodigious amount of network traffic and are inappropriate for service discovery among many systems over wide area networks and internetworks.